10/20/2011

(SPOILERY!) Last Night Was A Dark Shadows Night

SPOILERS ABOUND BELOW!

BEWARE!

Muahahahahaha!

I'm a BIG fan of the 1966-1971 gothic soap opera DARK SHADOWS!

I watched it from the time I was almost 7 years old with my mother. I probably watched it earlier than that, but my first memory of the show as a kid was when Willie Loomis opened the coffin containing Barnabas Collins and I was hooked!

I won't get into the details of the show right now, but I watched 9 episodes of it last night on dvd. The episodes I watched were the second disc of a 4 disc set of

DARK SHADOWS: THE BEGINNING

These dvds are pre-Barnabas.

NOW I'm going to get into the details of the show, after all... LOL!

They tell of the journey of a young woman named Victoria Winters to

Collinwood, Collinsport, Maine, USA.

She is an orphan and had been getting $50 a month from the time she was 2 years old until she was 16 years old at the foundling home where she lived and now worked. She was now 20 years old and had been hired to be the governess to a troubled young boy who lived in Collinwood, called David Collins. The allowance she had been mysteriously sent for so many years had the postmark of Bangor, Maine on it, so when she got the job offer from Collinsport, Maine, she decided to take it and to also try to find out something about her past. She hoped someone there in Collinwood or in Collinsport could tell her something about her family. This pre-Barnabas era of the show focused mainly on her search along with the Collins family and several people who lived in Collinsport, along with a man who was returning to Collinsport after being away for 10 years. His name was Burke Devlin. Burke had been accused of manslaughter 10 years previously and he was back for revenge on the man who had accused him and caused him to be jailed for 5 years, Roger Collins. Burke also planned on taking out his revenge on the whole Collins family.

The show was slightly spooky at this time, with dark houses and howling winds and thunderstorms, aplenty, but it didn't show any type of truly supernatural beings until we see the ghost of Josette Collins flitting around the original Collins mansion called by them The Old House.

From then on till Barnabas arrived on the scene, we saw one other ghost of the murdered Bill Malloy who was a valued friend and manager of the Collins family fishing fleet, David Collins' mother Laura who was a supernatural being called a Phoenix who tried to take David with her into the flames...

But from the time of Barnabas Collins, we began seeing all sorts of ghosts, witches, warlocks, zombies, werewolves, man-made monsters, other vampires and all kinds of weird and wonderful things that have made me and many others into fans of the show for the last 45 years +!